1. Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates in general to the field of location-based services and in particular to predicting parking availability for a geographic area.
2. Description of the Related Art
People often would appreciate insight into real-time parking availability for a geographic area. For example, a person driving into an urban neighborhood might appreciate knowing how much parking is available in that neighborhood, and the parking availability in surrounding neighborhoods. However, determining parking availability for large geographic areas and distributing this information to interested parties is difficult. Manually determining parking availability in real time requires considerable effort; surveying parking spaces by vehicle or on foot is tedious, requires massive manpower, and the gathered information is difficult to distribute.
Some municipalities have installed “smart” parking meters which provide usage data and indicate parking availability for individual locations. However, the use of these meters is limited to a small percentage of the overall parking capacity in many areas. In addition, smart meters generally do not provide parking information to the general public. As a result, parking information from smart meters is both extremely limited and unavailable to the public at-large.